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The board consists of many forums, but one, in particular, is getting much of the crawling attention and creating an unfair image of my site.

Generally, I'm trying to get away from the porn reputation that my board has inadvertently-attained, at Google et al.

In an effort to get a handle on all the porn that was being posted, at the board, I created a forum dedicated to legal porn and warned that porn found outside of this forum would be deleted - which is what was happening during routine maintenance.

Thousands of non-porn posts were also added to other forums. Google said it stopped 'seeing' porn, at the site, but its (and others') spiders are still crawling that forum and, as a result, reporting that my board is still mostly about porn.

Yes. I could delete the porn and, thereby, be done with it, but that would violate my believe in free speech, etc.

So, while doing some work, with phpbb3, I got the notion that, perhaps, I could force spiders away from their porn fixation by removing their permission to access that one forum.

Forgive my ignorance, though, but what is the difference between "View" and "Read"?

Presently, they are both set at: "ALL".

So, would my problem be solved if I changed "Read" to "REG"? (I don't want to stop people from viewing whatever is in that forum, say, via present search engine results. I just want to stop the spiders from counting that forum's content so, in the future, those results will have less to do with porno.)

View >>they can see that the forum is there.
Read>> as it implies - they can read the contents of that forum.

No I did not buy the fish - it is a carp of about 11 pounds caught on a luncheon meat pellet.

Another way to do what you want is to create a user group that you wish to be able to access the "strong" forum and then set the permission to the forum to "Private"
You can in Group permissions then give users of the group access to that forum.
Doing it this way you can restrict access to those that claim to be 18 or over.
Down side of this is that you have to manually add users to the usergroup.

That's not the same MOD that I'm using, but it appears to do the same thing as the one I'm using.

If you install the MOD, you will still probably need to read the info at the site mentioned above, in order to figure out how to correctly specify your disallow code, so that the spiders will only skip the forum that you want them to skip.

Yes 755 is correct for the phpbb2 directory.
There does not seem to be anything there that would stop them from crawling your site.
How do you know they are not doing so?
Do you have a mod installed that shows their presence in phpbb2? (I have such a mod installed so know they are there)
When there are a lot of "guests" on line check to see if one or more are showing multiple times and take a look at their IP in Admin CP
This is Googlebot 66.249.71.***
How long have you waited after posting the new robots.txt file before you have started to panic?
Google say that upon finding a robots.txt file it can take 24 hours for them to obey the instructions therein.
You set one up that barred them and perhaps it takes another 24 hours before they will respond to the absence of the bar.